| Just before New Year's, we rode with Lynn & Paul for 13 hours in their car to Sydney-- TaDaaa! the infamous Sydney Opera House |
| We prefer to do our city sightseeing from Botanical Gardens, parks and open spaces. |
| A lovely giant lotus blossom about 5" across |
| The effect of masses of lotus was stunningly beautiful |
| The Botanical Garden was full of weird plants like Banksia (center R) and pink flowering eucalyptus (center L) |
| Also making the Boatanical Garden their home were many camps of flying foxes (fruit bats ) which unfortunately damage the host trees |
| Loud raucous flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos were common all over Sydney |
| Some sort of strange agave |
| At brunch we met Simon (L) and David (R), friends of Jan in San Diego, who were a wealth of knowledge about Sydney and gave us some 2 for 1 passes |
| We scoped out where the NYE fireworks would be set off from: along the river from a string of barges... |
| ...all across the whole Sydney Bridge... |
| ...and from the tops of the tallest downtown business buildings. On NYE we were awed by the fireworks displays but got NO photos!! |
| Downtown NYE was wall-to-wall people, closed to vehicle traffic, and our hotel was in the middle of it all! |
| With a 2-for-1 pass from David & Simon, we visited the Sydney Aquarium and finally got to see live seahorses, which we never saw in 5 years of snorkeling |
| A relative of the seahorses, sea dragons |
| This is not a hunk of algae but a leafy sea dragon, hanging snout down |
| We also used those passes to go up in the Sky Tower, high over Sydney, for a last long look before flying off to Tasmania |
